A bump-in-the wire architecture may be used for deep packet inspection where it may be desired to perform processing on packets in a manner that is not detectable by other network elements or end users, and in a manner that does not affect the addressing or routing of packets through the network. For example, law enforcement agencies may be authorized to intercept real time data carrying multimedia applications, such as voice or video, transmitted over the Internet without being detected by the call participants. Other deep packet inspection or bump-in-the-wire applications include, for example, ensuring quality of service for certain packet types, meeting network traffic and bandwidth requirements, detecting malware, enforcing business conduct policies or enforcing network subscriber policy agreements on information exchanged inside and outside a company, monitoring, and filtering.
Such services may be implemented using a distributed architecture, wherein various processor and memory resources are distributed across multiple processing resources. Bladed systems may be used, for example, to scale deep packet inspection functions across multiple server blades. Load balancing is used in distributed architectures to determine which processing resources or server blades are assigned to handle packets corresponding to a particular traffic flow. Certain load balancers, however, are provided as expensive front end devices (e.g., external to the bladed system) or modify packet headers or other data in a way that may affect network addressing/routing or that may be detectable by other network elements or end users.